Exploring Asia’s Resilient Alliances
US President Donald Trump’s disdain for conventional alliance politics and nationalistic hostility to multilateral co-operation threaten to weaken the underpinnings of the gobal order and co-operation since 1945. Particularly so in Asia, where his demands for more burden-sharing commitments from traditional allies are fraying ties, and a strident US mercantilist trade posture is undermining free trade.
In this detailed look at regional co-operation in Asia during and after the Cold War, Andrew Yeo offers a theoretically innovative corrective to this pessimistic view. Applying a historical institutional model, he highlights how path dependency, positive feedback loops, strong and sustainable epistemic policy-making communities, and cultural factors have helped sustain the US hub-and-spokes system of alliances in Asia and a substantial, expanding network of multi- and mini-lateral institutions and partnerships. Critically, none of geostrategic power dynamics, or rational, functionalist arguments or identity politics are enough to explain the recent post-cold War proliferation in new regional institutions such as the TPP-11, the Quad-based security partnership or trilateral co-operation among Japan, China and South Korea. Yeo’s historically informed analysis of US engagement with Asia and granular examination of most, if not all, of the region’s key institutions demonstrates the resilience of Asia’s many and diverse forms of co-operation.
Global Asia.